Thursday, September 26, 2013

A first look to the new Pentaho BA Server 5.0 CE

It's a lot of time I'm playing with the new Pentaho BA Server 5.0 to see the what's next and now, I think, it is the right time to start talking about it. The first thing that appears is that Pentaho made a big refactoring for this release. A lot of changes from a brand new GUI to a completely new and clean source tree with less and more organized projects than the previous release.

What's changed from a developer point of view

The first big set of changes, visible only to developers like me interested in looking into the code for getting knowledge or customize something, is summarized below:

Project moved to github at this url. This is a good choice to improve collaboration between people and collaboration is one of the key points of the OSS philosophy. Almost any project around Pentaho is housed on this platform (Kettle not yet but it seems the only one).

The project organization in the source code radically changed trying to simplify the structure of the codebase (and in my opinion they get it). You can find a description about the the new project structure and role of any of the sub-projects in this article in the Pentaho wiki.

Then, as a Java architect, another interesting change. It seems they moved to IntelliJ as development platform of choice because of the presence of the IntelliJ metadata files in the source tree. I'm a user of IntelliJ (after having use Netbeans and Eclipse) so this is a switch that I liked a lot. So here at this page a detailed description about to how pull the platform project directly into IntelliJ to start working on it

Get the platform and start playing with it

What's the best way to have the new release in your hands to start trying it out? Two ways: a) get it from the pentaho ci build system or b) build it by yourself. As a developer, the second choice is the funniest and the more interesting if you, like me, want to understand how the things changes from time to time and want to be sure that everything goes correctly. Moreover the ability to prepare your own system package gives you a high degree of personalization; to do this you can find useful using CBF from Webdetails.

In this case, if you want to build it by yourself firstly you've to pull the project locally on your computer from the pentaho-platform repository on GitHub. Then the quick and dirty way to build Pentaho BA Server is to use the development ant build buildfile (dev-build.xml) given in the source tree and make a new complete development build. If intersted, you can get all of the possible targets for this ant command file by giving the following command ant -f dev_build.xml help

but I decided to follow the easy way by using the easiest command available to reach my goal. To do this go to the platform sources' root directory (we indicate that directory as <pentaho-platform-root>) and give the following command

The system will remain busy building your new release; depending on your hardware it will take 10 to 15 minutes to complete and you will have it cooked rightly. The result is

a packaged version of the Pentaho BA server in the <pentaho-platform-root>/assembly/dist

an unpackaged version of the same in the <pentaho-platform-root>/assembly/bin/stage/biserver-ce directory that you can use immediately for development and testing purposes.

That said, you can use the unpackaged version to easily and quickly look at the new features of the BA server.

What's changed from a user point of view

As soon as the platform opens in the browser you can see the new look. The new login screen looks really clean and minimal. I really like it! Now, remember that our old and friendly user joe is dead; if you want to login as admin you need to log in as the user Admin with password.... ah yes of course password (too difficult to remember!). In any case you can always get help by clicking with the mouse on the Login as Evaluator link to get the demo users and passwords.

As soon as you get logged in you discover a totally new user environment that I really like for its. The new environment now is based on a concept called Perspective.

A Pentaho perspective is an area that refers to a specific user context and that collect all the objects and actions referred to that particular context. You can change your perspective by clicking on the cascade menu located on the upper left side of the screen immediately below the main menu

We have 4 perspective in our Pentaho environment:

Home: It's the Perspective you get into as soon as you log into Pentaho (see screenshot two pictures above). It contains portlets for Recent files and Favorites files to help you in getting easier to reach the more often used reports or visualizations. Then you have a big blue button called Manage Datasources that is the new way you need to use to define datasources. From this release, this is the only place you can go to deal with datasources: you will not have anymore this function in the administration part of the system as in the previous releases. By clicking on that button you open the Manage Datasources dialog box that let you define new datasources and either edit or delete existing ones.

Browse files: it gives you the ability to access the solution through the solution explorer. As you can see here another interesting new feature. Now we've a differentiation between a public and a private part of the solution. As soon as a user gets created a new Home directory is created. That directory and its content is visible only to that particular user. Only a user with the Admin role has access to all of the users' home directories. All of the homes directories are under a parent folder called Home. There's also a public part of the solution identified by a root folder called Public. That part is the part of the solution that is shared, depending on the share level decided by the administrator or by the content owner, by every user in the system. There's no more contextual menu referred to any item of the solution (either folders or files) as in the previous release but you can have the contextual actions using the menu on the right of the File explorer.

Open files: As soon as you start an analysis view, a report, a visualization or anything else time the content you get is opened in this perspective. You always have multiple contents opened at the same time through a tabbed interface and you can easily switch back to the Browse files perspective or any other using the drop down menu we illustrated a while ago.

Schedule: The old My Workspace view is definitely dead. With this new release we have this perspective where the user can check the status of any the scheduled content and open the content for any terminated execution.

Administration: Another important change is about the administration of the Pentaho BA Server. The old administration console is definitely dead (I like this sooooo much!) and we've a new perspective accessible only to the Admin role and called Administration that let you do your administrative tasks.

Conclusion

So what's next? I think they made a big work reorganizing almost anything in a new and clean way. I really like it thanks a lot guys. I really appreciated they choose to implement a responsive design for this new GUI so that it could be easily used without any pain on any device but it isn't. So this is a good point in my opinion where they could invest some time and there's space to make things much better. In any case we must admit a good change versus a more intuitive and clean web interface so thank you Pentaho for this good job.

Good summary of the new things Pentaho did to make it more user friendly and enterprise ready.Granted, a lot more work is needed in Managing Data sources and editing a data source etc.. but this is a great start from which to start from ! Hope they can ramp up some and fix some of the major bugs in editing a data source, so it truly gets enterprise ready quickly.